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ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT IOWA CITY IOWA BEFORE 

THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF IOWA ON MAY 

TWENTY-FIFTH NINETEEN HUNDRED TEN 



BY 

JOSEPH NEWTON 



THE STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF IOWA 
IOWA CITY IOWA NINETEEN HUNDRED TEN 



• 8 









THE TORCH PROS 

CCOAR RAPIOS 

IOWA 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

It is not easy to speak of Lincoln calmly. He 
was a man of such high and tender humanity, of 
personality so appealing and pathos so melting, 
that almost every study of him ends in a blur of 
eulogy. No higher tribute could be paid to any 
man, yet that was just what he did not like and the 
reason why he refused, in his later years, to read 
biography. He had no vanity, and being a man 
of humor he did not pose, nor did he wish any one 
to draw him other than he was. But men can no 
more help loving and praising him than they can 
help loving and praising surpassing goodness 
anywhere. His very honesty in simplicity makes 
him all the more winning, and to this day he 
puzzles any artist for that he was so unlike any 
model. 

Lincoln was a great and simple man, so simple 
that many deemed him darkly deep ; and, like all 
simple men, he had a certain mystery about him ; 
a mystery too simple to be found out. That is to 



\ 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



say, he was a man who seemed complex because, 
in the midst of many complexities, he was, after 
all, simple; an uncommon man with common 
principles and virtues, who grew up in the back- 
yard of the republic and ascended to power in a 
time of crisis. His later fame, so unlike his early 
life, made men stare, because they had not seen 
the steps he took along the road. His genius was 
home-spun, not exotic. It does not dazzle or 
baffle, does not bewilder or amaze, and is thus an 
example and a legacy of inspiration. Yet no 
one who saw him ever saw another like him. He 
was unique. He stood apart. He was himself 
— original, genuine, simple, sincere. The more 
we know about him the greater he seems to be in 
his totality of powers, none of which was supreme- 
ly great, but all of which, united and held in poise, 
made him at once so universal and so unique. 

Behind Lincoln, as the background of his life, 
lay the wide melancholy of the western plain, its 
low hills, its shifting sky, its shadowy forests and 
winding streams, and the hardship and hazard 
of pioneer days. There we see the lad in the log 
cabin, Btudying l»y a dim tire-light; the rail- 
splitterand the reader of books; the Hat-boatman 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



going far down the rivers — a strange, heroic, 
pathetic story which still awaits the touch of a 
master hand. Then appears the tall, gawky cap- 
tain in the Black Hawk War, clad in a suit of 
blue jeans, sworn into the service by Jefferson 
Davis ; the postmaster at New Salem who carried 
his office in his hat ; the surveyor whose outfit was 
sold for debt; the village sceptic, fabulist and 
athlete ; and the young man standing white and 
forlorn at the grave of a country girl, whose image 
he kept in his heart wrapped in the sweet and 
awful sadness of the valley of shadows. 

Those early days return in all their monotony 
of privation and toil, full of the patience that 
could walk down a long road without turning, 
brightened by dutifulness alone, pointed but not 
cheered by wayside anecdote, until by struggle 
and sorrow he became a man. He was inured to 
hardship and poverty, rarely ill, wiry, stalwart 
and a man of regular habits; having a certain 
innate dignity and charm of nature, despite his 
ungainly figure and ill-fitting garb ; and what he 
was he had made himself. Having a mind too 
broad and grave for the details of life, he was as 
indifferent to the arts of societv as he was to the 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



beauty of trees and flowers. A master of men 
and at ease with them, lie had no skill with women, 
and was never so awkward and clumsy as when 
in their presence. At the grave of Ann Rutledge 
he vowed, it is said, never to marry ; but within a 
few months he was entangled again, learning 
from Mary Owens the comedy of love as before 
he had learned its tragedy. Seldom has there 
been such a blend of crudities and refinements, of 
ambitions and renunciations, of haunting beau- 
ties and gnarled angularities. 

No man ever had fewer illusions about himself 
and the world, and he did not expect great destiny 
to come to him as a lotter} T prize. He knew there 
must be work, patience, wisdom, disappointment ; 
he was not sanguine of himself, but he rated no 
eminence or honor too high or too difficult to 
attain. Never petulant but sometimes moody, 
he was fond of solitude, and would often sit for 
hours dead to the world and buried in thought. 
At other times a cloud would fall over his face, 
and he was the most hopeless and forlorn of 
mortals, as though tortured by some hidden 
sorrow, or brooding over some wrong thai never 
in time or eternity could be set right. When the 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



shadow lifted he was himself again, beguiling the 
hours with the aptness and ingenuities of his 
anecdotes — some of them, it is true, more cogent 
than delicate, though he tolerated smuttiness only 
when it was disinfected by humor. He was 
strangely reserved in friendship, rarely surren- 
dering entire confidence, and those who knew him 
best were younger than himself. All the while 
he seemed to know everybody, yet only a few 
ever felt that they knew him. 

So we meet him in 1840, making his way slowly, 
unhappy, ambitious, and alone. He owned a 
horse and was fond of riding, but he made a poor 
income and often went to bed with no notion of 
how he should meet the claims of the morrow. 
For nearly one-fifth part of his life he owed 
money he could not pay, and while of easy dispo- 
sition, debt galled him and hastened his wrinkles. 
His marriage, though not without its jars, was 
in every way advantageous to him. It whetted 
his industry, did not nurse too much the pen- 
chant for home indolence that he had, and taught 
him, particularly, that there was such a thing as 
society, which observes a man's boots as well as 
his principles. He was always a loyal and rever- 



10 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ent husband, a gentle but not positive father, and 
the towering ambition of his wife out-topped his 
own. Yet, while not lazy, he always loafed a 
little, studying men more than books, and reading 
the signs of the times. 

Just what position Lincoln held at the bar in 
his early years is not easy to know. He did not 
study the law deeply until a later time and was 
never a learned lawyer, as that phrase is now 
used. Most of his practice was on the old Eighth 
Circuit — following the judges from one log 
court-house to another, always over bad roads 
and often over swollen streams ; a kind of life he 
enjoyed for its careless, roving freedom, its hu- 
man comedy, and its rollicking comradeship. 
This is not to say that he practiced by his wits, 
though he trusted much to his native gift of 
speech, and for all his doric simplicity and integ- 
rity a shrewder mortal has never lived. He was 
at his best before juries, where his knowledge of 
human nature, his keen logic, and his gifts of 
humor and mimicry came into full play, and 
where his occasional bursts of appeal swept all 
before him. 

Bui the law is a .jealous mistress, and so far 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN ll 

Lincoln was more absorbed in politics than in law. 
What led him on was a little engine of ambition 
that knew no rest, which strove not for riches but 
for honors; and if the fire burned low, his wife 
added fuel. He knew how to play the game of 
politics according to the rules thereof, and was 
not over-nice as to methods when no moral prin- 
ciple was involved. On one issue, however — 
that of slavery — he stood firm from the first, 
and neither the allurements of office nor the 
blandishments of good-fellowship could move 
him ; though as a loyal party man he was willing 
to keep his convictions in abeyance for the sake 
of party harmony and victory. He was never a 
professional politician — that is he did not live 
by holding office, and of the $200 made up by his 
friends for the canvass of 1846 he returned 
$199.90 unused. 

Of his career in Congress little need be said, 
except that it is valuable chiefly as showing us the 
politician out of which the statesman was made. 
It took a long time to make Lincoln ; he was still 
growing when he died. His speeches at this time, 
one of them waggish almost to the point of buf- 
foonery, are not edifying, least of all when read 



12 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

alongside his solemn, seer-like words ten years 
later. Some have thought that they could detect 
a tone of inner protest in his speeches in Con- 
gress; but that is the error, into which so many 
have fallen, of reading his early years in the light 
of his later days. No ; if we are to understand 
Lincoln, we must keep in mind his "talent for 
growth", and watch the slow unfolding of his life. 
But it is true that his stay at the capital made 
him more studious, by making him aware of the 
defects of his early training; while his visit to 
New England showed him, for the first time, that 
the nation had in its bosom two antagonistic 
ideals, both growing every day and struggling to 
be free. He returned, a subdued man, having 
seen a cloud upon the horizon portentous of im- 
pending storm. 

No doubt it was a heavenly destiny, shaping his 
end, that sent him back to Springfield, and out on 
the muddy roads of the old Eighth Circuit. Po- 
litically he seemed to himself, indeed, a man 
without a future, but that was less important than 
the fact that he was not prepared for the future 
that awaited him. Even at. forty he was singu- 
larly immature; he had not yet come to a full 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 13 

mastery of his powers; and the conflicting ele- 
ments of his nature needed to be melted and fused 
into a more solid unity. As has often been point- 
ed out, this came at last at the call of a great cause, 
evoking in him a vein of mysticism, which, with 
his canny sagacity and his humane pity, more and 
more swayed him; softening all that was hard 
within, and hardening all that was soft. Of this 
we are sure : when he returned to public life in 
1854, he was a changed man, moving with a firmer 
tread, in one way not less frank and friendly, but 
in another a separate and detached soul — as one 
whose eye was set on some star visible to himself 
alone. 

Thenceforward Lincoln became every day more 
serious, more solitary, more studious than ever 
before. Abjuring politics, he studied law in 
earnest, and no man ever had greater power of 
application than he. Also, he began a course of 
rigid mental discipline with the intent to improve 
his faculties, especially his powers of logic and of 
language. Hence his fondness for Euclid, which 
he carried with him on the circuit until he could 
with ease demonstrate all the propositions in the 
six books. In the same way he took up German, 



14 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

but he seems never to have attained to a working 
mastery of it. Shakespeare and the Bible he 
read devotedly, parts of them many times, though 
he did not read either one of them through. This 
fellowship with great books bore fruit in a finer 
feeling for words, and the florid rhetoric of his 
early days became an aversion. His style became 
simple, forthright, and thrusting, and the style 
was the man. 

His figure was familiar in Springfield as he 
strode along from his home on Eighth Street to 
his dingy office in the Square. Rarely has an 
office been conducted with less order. He carried 
most of his memoranda in his high hat, together 
with bits of poetry and other items clipped from 
newspapers, of which he was an assiduous reader. 
Ten years later a law-student, in cleaning up the 
office, found quantities of Congressional garden 
seed mixed with Whig speeches and Abolitionist 
pamphlets, and some of the seed had sprouted in 
the accumulated dirt. Often lie needed money, 
l»iil he could not be induced to sue for his fees 
which were bo small that his partner, and even 

.Indue Davis, expostulated with hini. lint lie 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 15 

worked hard, and rapidly developed into one of 
the best trial lawyers in the State. 

As a lawyer Lincoln was an advocate rather 
than a jurist — though he sometimes sat as judge 
pro tern for his friend David Davis — a "case 
lawyer", in the phrase of the craft. Averse to 
office drudgery and impatient of technicalities, 
he was singularly lucid in stating a case, courte- 
ous but searching in examining witnesses, force- 
ful and sagacious in argument, having a remark- 
able memory for evidence, and when the case 
turned upon human or moral issues a persuasive 
advocate. His presence was commanding, his 
denunciation terrific, and the spell of his marvel- 
ous personality gave him an almost occult power 
over juries. Sometimes, though not often, his 
humor won the verdict; but he was not always 
mild, not always funny, and when he was angry 
it was a terrible spectacle. Though his name ap- 
pears in the Illinois Reports in one hundred and 
seventy-three cases, his income was never more 
than two or three thousand dollars a year. 

Life on the old Eighth Circuit was a gay one, 
and Lincoln loved it. Books dealing with this 
period show us pictures of dramatic court scenes, 



16 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

of famous murder trials, of parleying lawyers 
and lying witnesses, of country taverns where 
judge and jury, lawyers and litigants sat at table 
together ; of a long, gaunt figure stretched on beds 
too short for him, studying by a dim light; of 
story-telling jousts continuing, amidst roars of 
laughter, far into the night. Too often he has 
been portrayed, at this time, as a mere fabulist, 
which was as far as possible from the truth, 
though it is true that his humor was brightest 
when his heart was most forlorn. This may ac- 
count for the memories of these years of poverty, 
obscurity, and baffled ambition ; humor being his 
door of escape from pressing thoughts within. 

But fundamentally Lincoln was serious, even 
sad, and while men spoke of him as "Old Abe" 
behind his back, in his presence they indulged in 
no uncouth familiarities. His humor — and it 
was humor rather than wit, for he was essentially 
a poet and a man of pathos — lay close to that 
I »r< > t'< mud and inscrutable melancholy which clung 
to him and tinged all his days; the shadow, per- 
haps, of some pre-natal gloom woven in the soul 
of his mother, and deepened, no doubt, by a tem- 
perament which fell the tragedy in mortal things. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 17 

It was not for his humor that men loved him, nor 
yet for his intellect ,with its blend of integrity and 
shrewdness, which all admired, but for his man- 
liness, his simplicity, his sympathy, and for much 
else which we feel even now and cannot describe. 
To this day, men who were close to Lincoln have 
a memory as of something too deep for speech. 
They recount his doings, they recall his words, 
they tell his stories, but they always leave some- 
thing untold : only a light comes into their eyes, 
and one realizes what a well-founded reverence is. 
Of his inner life during those buried years — 
from 1848 to 1854 — only a few glimpses remain, 
but they show that it was a time of revolution and 
crisis. Mentally he was occupied as never before 
with those questions which every man, soon or 
late, must settle for himself; that Lincoln met 
and made terms with them is certain, but by what 
process we know not. So also the great national 
question, which lay upon him like the weight of a 
personal care. His eulogy of Henry Clay, while 
not a great speech, revealed that he was convinced 
that the slavery question could no longer be com- 
promised, and what a fearful looking for, of 
judgment to come, was foreshadowed in his clos- 



18 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ing words. Before his public call came he had 
passed the whole problem through his silent 
thought, studying it from both sides, and from 
end to end — a fact which should be kept in mind 
by those who imagine that his speeches were made 
as if by magic. But to the end of his life, amidst 
the whirl of politics and the storm of war, his 
circuit-riding days were invested for him with a 
grave and joyous memory. 

Whatever may have been the motives of Steph- 
en A. Douglas in repealing the Missouri Compro- 
mise — and they are as muddy to-day as they were 
in 1854 — he precipitated a revolution, and be- 
came the avant courier of Civil War. Lincoln, 
now in the prime of his powers, was on his feet 
to refute the new dogma and to challenge the man 
who had wrought such mischief; and there fol- 
lowed a debate, continuing at intervals from 1854 
to 1858, memorable in the annals of the nation. 
If, as the story runs, it was a sleepy old game of 
whist that led to the repeal of that Compact, the 
conflict did not again cease until slavery was 
destroyed in the fire kindled by its friends. 

Only a few men, said Edmund Burke, really see 
what passes before their eyes, and Lincoln was 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 19 

one of them. By nature a watcher of the signs of 
the times, he did not read them amiss, but he was 
slow to admit, even to himself, the bitter truth as 
he saw it. Hating slavery, he yet recognized its 
constitutional existence and legal rights, and saw 
no way of dealing with it except to push it back 
into a corner and let it die. What he feared more 
than all else was a clash between the radicals of 
the North and the hotspurs of the South, and a 
rush to arms. He brooded over the abyss gloom- 
ily, and his keen logic, touched with passionate 
earnestness, gave his speech a luminous solidity 
rare in the history of eloquence. Even his jeal- 
ousy of Douglas served the better to point his 
logic with tips of fire. 

Wary, discreet, and politic, he did not come for- 
ward to speak and act until he was fully satisfied 
that the time was ripe, and no one was ever a 
better judge of the temper of the hour. Often 
his feelings — intense and almost volcanic at 
times — pressed hard for hot words and radical 
measures, but he bit his lips, to use his own 
phrase, and kept quiet — jotting down his 
thoughts on scraps of paper and stowing them 
away in his high hat. Some of those fugitive 



20 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

pieces have been preserved, and they show with 
what keen and searching logic he had gone to the 
bottom of his subject. So that when he uttered 
his word the whole man was in it, and his oratory 
was logic on fire, all the more effective for its 
evident restraint of passion not less than for its 
austere lucidity of style. 

When he replied to Douglas during the State 
Fair in October, 1854, he was an obscure man, 
known as a shrewd lawyer, a story-teller, and a 
Whig of anti-slavery leanings. But when he had 
finished, men of all parties knew that a new leader 
had come, the equal of Douglas in debate — a man 
of genius ablaze with passion. For four hours 
the circuit-riding attorney unfolded and describ- 
ed the great issue with a mastery of facts, a 
logical strategy, and a penetration of insight that 
astonished even his friends. Never did the pet 
dogma of Douglas receive a more thorough ven- 
tilation, while the Senator himself sat on a front 
bench, not twelve feet away, intently listening. 
There were warm passages between them as the 
afternoon ran along, but Lincoln kept his temper, 
even under the most provoking taunts, and his 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 21 

readiness of retort delighted the vast throng. 
One who heard that speech has left this memory : 

It was a warmish day, and Lincoln was in his shirt 
sleeves. Although awkward, he was not in the least 
embarrassed. He began in a slow and hesitating 
manner, but it was evident that he had mastered his 
subject, and that he knew he was right. He had a 
high-pitched, falsetto voice that could be heard a long 
distance in spite of the bustle of the crowd. He 
had the accent and pronunciation peculiar to his 
native State, Kentucky. His gestures were made 
with his body and his head rather than with his 
hands, and were the natural expression of the man. 
Gradually he warmed up with his subject, his angular- 
ity disappeared, and he passed into that attitude of 
unconscious majesty so conspicuous in Saint-Gau- 
dens's statue at the entrance of Lincoln Park in 
Chicago. His listeners felt that he believed every 
word he said, and that, like Luther, he would go to 
the stake rather than abate one jot or tittle of it. In 
such moments he was the type of the ancient Hebrew 
prophet. 

Twelve days later the rivals met in debate at 
Peoria, where Lincoln repeated his Springfield 
effort, but in an improved form both as to com- 
pactness of argument and forcefulness of style. 
Fortunately he wrote out the speech — from 
memory, for he did not use notes — and it re- 



22 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

mains to this day one of the imperishable utter- 
ances of the slavery debates, if not of our entire 
history. Some think it superior to Webster's 
reply to Hayne, because its theme is loftier and 
its scope wider. Others hold it to be the superior 
of the two as an example of English style, making 
up in its simplicity, directness and lucidity what 
it lacks of the massive movement and rhythmic 
flow of the Websterian diction. In after years 
Lincoln regarded the Peoria address as perhaps 
the ablest speech he had ever made, and while it 
contained few of those phrases which in his later 
speeches became popular slogans, its austerity of 
restraint gave it an added impressiveness and 
force. 

What arrests one in all his speeches was the 
spirit of sympathy and justice shown towards the 
people of the South, against whom he had no 
unkindly feeling. They were his kinsmen, and 
he knew their situation, many of whom hated 
slavery but knew not how to rid themselves of it. 
He was aware that interest and long usage had 
blinded their judgment, just as like interest and 
usage would have blinded the moral sense of the 
people of the North. He did not hold the South 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 23 

solely responsible for slavery, though he felt that 
they should long ago have devised some system 
of gradual emancipation. Unlike the Abolition 
orators, he did not dwell on the cruelty of slavery, 
but he left no doubt as to his feeling that it was 
grossly wrong, unjust, and unwise. While he did 
not plead for abolition, he had none of the spirit 
of concession to mere property interest that ruin- 
ed Webster, and spoke always as one to whom 
the moral issue was vividly alive. Until the Dred 
Scott decision swept away all hope, he continued 
to urge the restoration of the Spirit of Compro- 
mise, without which he saw one side aggressive, 
the other retaliating — and in the end War. 

Yet, for all his calm restraint and wise conser- 
vatism, Lincoln was a man of fiery nature, and 
there were occasional gleams of a slumbering 
lightning which he hardly dared to use. Once at 
least, at Bloomington in 1856, his impenetrable 
reserve gave way, his pent-up brooding passion 
rushed forth into flaming speech, and his words 
swayed and quivered as if charged with electric- 
ity. But it was not so much slavery as the threat 
of disunion that stirred him, disclosing at once 
the issue and the leader, and his thrilling appeal 



24 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

fused the discordant elements of his audience into 
a solid and victorious party. Every hair of his 
head stood on end, fire seemed to flash from his 
little grey eyes, and the whole man was ablaze 
when he said, with a tragic earnestness that almost 
lifted men from their seats: "We will say to the 
Southern disunionists, we won't go out of flic 
Union and you shan't !" Of that speech Hern- 
don wrote in a lecture, twelve years later : 

The Bloomington speech was the one grand effort 
of his life. The smothered fire broke out ; his eyes 
were aglow ; lie felt justice ; he stood before the throne 
of the eternal Bight. It was logic; it was pathos; it 
was enthusiasm; it was justice, equity, truth and 
right set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened 
by the wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, 
backed with wrath. If Mr. Lincoln was six feet four 
inches high usually, at Bloomington that day he was 
seven feet, and inspired at that. 

Most men receive from their audience in vapor 
what they return in flood, but it was not after 
that maimer that Lincoln was eloquent. With a 
greal crowd before him his thought seemed to be 
moving in remote and lonely regions, as one who 
saw things in the large and from afar. His ap- 
peal was tint so much to his audience as to the 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 25 

individual man of whom it was composed, and to 
what was highest in every one of them. He be- 
lieved that the human soul, when separated from 
the tumults which commonly disturb it, cannot 
refuse to respond to the voice of righteousness and 
reason, and his faith acted like a spell upon those 
who heard him. Each man seemed to stand apart 
from the throng, and in those great hours when 
the speaker stood as one transfigured and inspired 
men felt that their own souls spoke to them in the 
tones of the orator. He rarely, if ever, raised 
his hand above his head in gesture, and he had 
almost none of the hypnotic magnetism which 
legend attributes to him. His very voice, so keen 
and thin, with little feeling of harmony in it, and 
little variety of cadence ; his enunciation, so care- 
ful, so deliberate, and at times so hesitating ; his 
restrained manner, in which there was nothing 
of the daring reckless freedom of the popular 
agitator — all these added to the impression that 
he was a man of authentic tidings. Such elo- 
quence is possible only in times of great crises, 
and Lincoln spoke with the ultimate grace of sim- 
plicity at an hour when the right word fell with 
the authority of an apparition. 



26 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

After all, history is only past politics, and those 
who imagine that Lincoln waited for honors to 
be thrust upon him do not know the man whom 
Herndon, his partner, knew. Had he been such 
a guileless Parsifal in politics he could never have 
dominated his party in Illinois, dictated its plat- 
forms, and guided it into a moderate and wise 
course. Still less could he have met the astute, 
artful, masterful Douglas, whose resourcefulness 
was only surpassed by his unctuous and persua- 
sive sophistry. An example of his far-reaching 
sagacity, too often overlooked, may be seen in the 
crisis of 1858. 

With the revolt of Douglas against the Buch- 
anan regime came a quick turn of events which 
baffled the most astute, and deceived some of the 
very elect. Rumors were adrift to the effect that 
"the little Giant", having defied the Slave Party, 
might follow the logic of his position. On one 
issue at least he was already standing with the 
Republicans, and there were those who hailed his 
coming over to the party with great joy. Though 
a sinner somewhat late in returning, they con- 
ceived that he might still further repent of his sin 
against the peace and good faith of the nation. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



2i 



Outside of Illinois, the party seemed almost will- 
ing to let by-gones be by-gones and to accept 
Douglas into the ranks as a leader. Stranger 
things had happened, and the suggestion gathered 
momentum and plausibility as it spread. 

One after another men like Seward, Wilson, 
Colfax, and Greeley, were won to this view, some 
going so far as to intimate, as a practical expe- 
dient, that the party demand might be softened in 
order to admit so able a convert. At last Greeley 
— honest, well-meaning, but ill-advised — actu- 
ally urged the Republicans of Illinois not to put 
up a candidate against Douglas in the coming 
contest for the Senate. No one now believes that 
Douglas ever had any intention of going over to 
the Republican party; but in the new turn of 
affairs he did see, as he thought, a chance of at- 
taching that party, or a part of it, to the tail of 
his kite. Having breached the Democracy, if he 
could divide the Republican party he might be 
able to harness one of its steeds with his Democra- 
tic donkey and ride first into the Senate, and then 
into the White House. It was a daring scheme, 
but not at all impossible, and it would have suc- 
ceeded had not it been for the courage, fidelity, 



28 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

and sagacity of Lincoln and a little coterie of 
friends. 

One has only to read the letters of Lincoln to 
learn that he had the ambitions of a man ; but it 
must also be said that in this crisis, though his 
own political future was involved, personal mo- 
tives were secondary. Indeed, he had more than 
once shown his willingness to stand aside for other 
men who were true to the right star — for Trum- 
bull in 1854, to go no farther back. But he could 
not sit still and see the party which had fought the 
repeal of the Missouri Compromise, had survived 
the defeat of 1856, and had risen to new life under 
the staggering blow of the Dred Scott decision, 
fall into the hands of a man whom lie regarded 
as a trimmer, a trickster, and a political gambler. 
So that when the wily Senator returned in tri- 
umph to Chicago, feeling that his fight in behalf 
of Kansas had won the day, he found, to his 
amazement, that Lincoln had dictated an issue 
which threw him upon the defensive. 

To-day the words of Lincoln .-it Springfield on 
June 1(>, 1858, march before us with the solemn 
foot-fall of desi in v. Even to the men who heard 
them, on thai summer day, they seemed heavy 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 29 

with awful prophecies. If radicalism means 
rootedness, in that utterance he placed his party 
on a basis so radical that Douglas dared not fol- 
low. He not only rescued his party from an 
unholy alliance; he saved it from apostacy and 
ruin. Against the advice of all his friends, ex- 
cept Herndon, he said : 

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I 
believe this government cannot endure permanently 
half-slave and half-free. I do not expect the Union 
to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — 
but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will 
become all one thing or all the other. Either the 
opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread 
of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in 
the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinc- 
tion ; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall 
become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as 
new, North as well as South. 

Small wonder that the whole nation watched 
the debate which followed, where Shiloh was 
fought at Ottawa and Gettysburg at Freeport. 
When Lincoln found himself competing for the 
Senatorship with the quickest and most popular 
debater in the nation, he saw nothing odd or 
dramatic about it; not that he had self-conceit, 
but that he was aware of his powers and thought 



30 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

the opportunity possible; having prepared his 
speeches while watching the flies on the ceiling of 
his dingy back office. Douglas, with his powerful 
voice and facile energy, went into the campaign 
at full speed. Lincoln began cautiously, but 
when they came out of it Douglas was worn down 
with rage and hoarseness, while Lincoln was 
fresher than ever. His opponent was often arro- 
gant and testy in his presence, but he, rarely flur- 
ried and seldom angry, so grew that when, though 
defeated for the Senate, he entered the White 
House at last, Douglas was less astonished than 
any one else — and held his hat while he took the 
oath of office. 

In political philosophy Lincoln was a Henry 
Clay Whig with strong anti-slavery sentiments, 
never an Abolitionist, never an advocate of "the 
higher law". Like all great reformers, at least 
in the earlier stage of their career, his ideals were 
more frequently in the past than in the future, 
and he began, not without hesitation, a pruning 
of gross abuses, a reverting to the healthy sim- 
plicity of by-gone times. Like Shibli Bagarag in 
"The Shaving of Shagpat" published by 
George Meredith the same year — he began by 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 31 

proposing a friendly and conservative shave for 
the Slave Despot. True to the nature of tyranny, 
the Slave Power waxed exceeding angry, until its 
face was like a berry in a bush ; but when Shagpat 
had to be shaved thoroughly, our Shibli was equal 
to the task. 

Amidst threatening chaos he ascended from a 
country law office to the high place of power as if 
it were a matter of course, giving to Herndon — 
his friend, his partner, and his indefatigable fel- 
low-worker in a great human cause — permission 
to use the firm name, as before, without a con- 
scious trait of poetry ; yet looking to the far fu- 
ture with a longing that was poetry. Though one 
was taken and the other left, and a great war 
rolled between them, the old shingle still hung in 
the bare stairway until death dissolved the part- 
nership. One who wrote to Herndon asking if 
his partner was strong enough and firm enough 
to undertake his task, received this reply : 

I know Lincoln better than he knows himself. I 
know this seems a little strong, but I risk the asser- 
tion. Lincoln is a man of heart — aye, as gentle as a 
woman's and as tender — but he has a will as strong 
as iron. He therefore loves all mankind, hates slav- 
ery and every form of despotism. Put these together 



32 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

and you can form your own conclusion. Lincoln will 
fail here, namely, if a question of political economy — 
if any question comes up which is doubtful, question- 
able, which no man can demonstrate, then his friends 
can rule him ; but when on Justice, Right, Liberty, the 
Government, the Constitution, and the Union, then 
you may all stand aside : he will rule then, and no 
man can move him — no set of men can do it. There 
is no fail here. This is Lincoln, and you mark my 
prediction. You cntd I must keep the people right; 
God will keep Lincoln right. 

Of leaders of men there are two kinds. One 
sees the thing as it ought to be and is to be, and 
condemns all else that falls below the ideal. Thoy 
are reformers, agitators, and sometimes icono- 
clasts — dreamers who know not the slow ways 
whereby dreams are wrought into reality. They 
are noble in their fealty to high ideals ; by their 
burning zeal they make us feel and think; but by 
a sure instinct we refuse to entrust the reins of 
power into their hands. Amidst the tangle of 
legal rights and practical necessities, of conflict- 
ing interests and constitutional pri (visions, they 
are helpless. Thai they sec no difficulties is their 
virtue; that others see all the difficulties is per- 
haps a greater virtue; and it would be 1 rite to say 
that the nation needed, and needs, both virtues. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 33 

As a fact, in the case of the abolition of slavery the 
radical and violent solution of the idealists had 
at last to be adopted. 

The other kind of leader sees the ideal no less 
clearly, nor is he less loyal to it. But he also sees 
things as they are, sees them steadily and sees them 
whole, and tries patiently and wisely to work out 
the best results with the forces with which he has 
to deal. He knows that men are slow of heart and 
stumbling of step, and he does not run so far 
ahead of them that they lose sight of him and 
stop; he knows how to get along with ordinary 
humanity. Such a leader was Lincoln — uniting 
an unwavering fidelity to a moral ideal with the 
practical acumen to make his dream come true — 
handicapped by all the things that go to make up 
wisdom, yet resolute in his patience, his courage, 
his self-control, and in his mastery of his life 
consistently with a high moral purpose. Here 
lies the secret of his statesmanship. No leader 
in this land ever stood so close to the common 
people ; no one has been at once so frank and so 
subtle. He knew the people, he was one of them, 
and they knew and loved and followed him — 



34 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

paying to him, and to their country, the ''last 
full measure of devotion." 

Like all great leaders, Lincoln was by nature 
conservative, too reverent to be cheerfully icon- 
oclastic, and when forced to act by the educative 
and compulsive power of events, he obeyed the 
majestic genius of Law. He was not willing to 
wreck the Union in order to abolish slavery. In- 
tense as were his feelings against that awful evil 
— for which North and South were involved in a 
common historic guilt — he refused to sink the 
ship in order to cleanse it. He knew that slavery 
was fixed in the law of the land, confessed in the 
Constitution, and sanctioned by the courts, and 
his oath of office was a vow to uphold the law. 
But he also knew that slavery was fundamentally 
wrong — both to master and man — and that it 
would have to go at last, because the increasing 
kindness and justice of the world were against it. 
His supreme aim, as he wrote to Greeley, was not 
to save or destroy slavery, but to save the Union — 
without slavery if he could, with slavery if he 
must — and from that purpose he could not be 
turned aside. lie was never an Abolitionist. 1 Ic 
repudiated the dogma of confiscation. lie held, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 35 

consistently, that if the nation was to free the 
slaves it should buy them and set them free ; and 
this he had it in mind to do — but war came, and 
blood, and fire, and 

"A measureless ocean of human tears." 
From the fall of Arthur Ladd, its first victim, 
to its closing scene, that was the saddest and the 
noblest war that ever raged — a Nemesis of na- 
tional sin and the beginning of a new era. Had 
there been such a feeling of national unity as now 
exists, slavery could have been checked and ulti- 
mately abolished. But such a feeling did not 
exist ; a fatal dualism had been growing from the 
first, and finally rent the nation in a conflict the 
prophecy of which was written in the whole his- 
tory of the colonies, if not in the annals of Eng- 
land for centuries back. So that Lincoln — in 
whom, as Stephens noted, the sentiment of Union 
"rose to the sublimity of a religious mysticism" 
— instead of saving the Union, may almost be said 
to have presided at its birth, and witnessed its 
christening with blood and tears. His personality 
was providential, and the republic of to-day, unit- 
ed and free, is at once his dream and his memo- 
rial. 



36 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

Through it all Lincoln kept his patience, his 
gentleness, his faith, and his clear, cool reason, 
though harassed by office-seekers, lampooned by 
critics, and reviled by radicals. In time of tumult 
he was serene, even humorous; in a tempest of 
hatred he was the still center of kindness; and 
his face wore amidst the clouds of war the grief 
of a nation torn and bleeding of heart. He de- 
meaned himself so nobly in that critical and test- 
ing ordeal, he had such resources of sagacity, such 
refinements of sympathy, such wonderful secrets 
of endurance, that no one could fail to be moved 
and humbled, if nothing more, by intercourse 
with him. There he stood, the central figure of 
the conflict, gentle, strong and wise, firm as gran- 
ite if need required, yet strangely piteous and sad, 
bearing insult without revenge, doing his duty as 
God gave him to see the right, and to this day his 
very name casts over men a solemn and haunting 
spell. 

As Douglas said, he was "one of those peculiar 
men who perform with admirable skill everything 
which they undertake." Simple in manner, plain 
in speech, his quaint humor and homely ways gave 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 37 

him a familiarity of relation with the people 
which few men enjoy, and he ruled the nation as 
if he were practicing law. Disasters gathered 
thick upon the fields of battle, and the tide of 
public feeling seemed at times to turn against 
him, but he kept his wits and never lost heart. 
Beneath a mask of careless humor and guileless 
simplicity he concealed the wiles of strategy, and 
was often most anxiously reticent when appar- 
ently the most indifferent and jocular. "His 
' cunning' fairly enters the borders of inspira- 
tion, ' ' said Evarts, in a sentence unusually terse 
for Evarts. It might better have been called a 
trinity of shrewdness, tact, and lightning-quick- 
ness of expedient, whereby he divined the trends 
of public sentiment and piloted the storm of war. 
Amid the wild passions of the hour, and a babel of 
discordant voices, he held aloft the ideals of peace 
through Union, of liberty under the law, of mercy 
in victory. He had no vanity, no bitterness, no 
pettiness, and his ingenuity of self-effacement 
was as remarkable as his unwillingness to evade 
duty or escape censure. With his order to Meade 
to follow up the victory he sent a note which 



38 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

revealed, like a ray of light, what manner of man 

sat in the White House : 

This order is not of record. If you ate successful 
you may destroy it, together with this note; if you 
fail, publish the order, and I will take the responsi- 
bility. 

No one claims that Lincoln was a master of 
political science and history ; but within the range 
of his knowledge and vision, which did not extend 
far beyond the Constitution and laws of his native 
land, he was a statesman. If he suffered himself, 
as he frankly confessed, to be guided by events, it 
was not because he had lost sight of principles, 
still less because he was drifting, but because he 
recognized in the events the movement of moral 
forces, which he was bound to heed, and the foot- 
steps of God, which he was bound to follow. He 
sanctioned, though he did not originate, the mili- 
tary arrests, in the sincere belief that the power 
was given by the Constitution; and his justifica- 
tion of their use was scrupulously devoid of soph- 
istry. That lie made mistakes in his choice of 
men, particularly of military men, is not denied. 
Yet nothing could direct him or any one else to 
the right man except the criterion of experience, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 39 

fearfully costly as it was. Few of all those who 
called him a tyrant, ever charged him with per- 
sonal cruelty, for he had set his heart on saving 
life whenever there was the slightest excuse ; tak- 
ing time, amidst harassing cares, to mitigate the 
horrors of war, and even to write to those who 
had lost their loved ones on the field of battle : 

Dear Madam : I have been shown in the files of 
the War Department a statement of the Adjutant- 
General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of 
five sons who have died gloriously on the field of 
battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any 
words of mine which should attempt to beguile you 
from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I 
cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation 
that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they 
died to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may 
assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave 
you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, 
and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid 
so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. 

History has made record of those awful years 
when the bravest of men, arrayed in long lines of 
blue and grey, were cut down like grass. Events 
marched rapidly ; the slaves were freed, the arm- 
ies of the South melted away, and the hand that 
guided the war was held out in brotherly forgive- 



40 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

ness. The men of the future, looking back from 
afar, unbiased and elear-eyed, will say that the 
noblest feat of the genius of Lincoln was the pol- 
icy he outlined for dealing with the South after 
the war. There was no rancor in it, no gleam of 
selfish pride in power, but a magnanimity in tri- 
umph that led Tolstoi to say of him that he was "a 
Christ in miniature." His words had in them, 
toward the end, a tenderly solemn, seer-like qual- 
ity, a strain as of blended prophecy and pity. 
There was on him, then, something of that touch 
of gentleness in sadness, as if presaging doom; 
and this it was that men felt when they caught 
his eye, which so many said they could never for- 
get. His death filled the nation with awe akin 
to that evoked by the great tragedies — something 
of inevitability, much of mystery, as impossible 
to account for as it is to measure the heavens or to 
interpret the voices of the winds. 

It has been said — by Thomas Carlyle — that 
the religion of a man is the chief fact with regard 
to him. If we seek for this primary thing in 
Lincoln, it is found not in his use of Bible imagery 
— though parts of the Bible were written in his 
memory — nor yet in his words of goodwill to the 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 41 

men of this or that sect, but in the fiber of his soul, 
the qualities of his mind, and most of all in the 
open book of his life. His faith was so much a 
part of his being that one must analyze him in 
order to find it; his mind was so moral, and his 
morality so intelligent, that they cannot be set the 
one over against the other. In his elemental 
qualities of courage, honor and loyalty to truth 
and the ideal, his melting pity and delicate justice, 
the faith on which he acted is unveiled as it could 
not be revealed in any list of dogmas. For surely, 
as far as mortal may, he exemplified the spirit 
of Jesus in his life, and it is there that we must 
look for the real religion of the man. 

Lincoln had a profound and penetrating intel- 
lect, but it was practical not speculative. Of the 
skyey genius of Plato and Emerson he had none. 
Emerson he did not understand, but he loved 
Channing and Theodore Parker. Such a mind is 
never radical, nor does it outrun the facts to see 
what the end of things will be. It deals with real- 
ities, not theories, suspects its own enthusiasms, 
and is content to take one step at a time. He 
knew not "the great escapings of ecstatic souls", 
and it is a pity, for the memory of such hours 



42 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

would have brightened his journey with oases of 
lucid joy. Whereas he lived in a dun-colored 
world, sensitive to its plaintive minor note, under 
a sky as grey as a tired face. So far as is known 
he formulated no system, though he was quite 
emphatic in his denial of certain doctrines of the 
creeds as they were taught — the atonement, for 
example, the miracles, and the dogma of eternal 
hell. But all who stood near him felt that in a 
mystic and poetic way he was a man of faith, even 
if the cast of his mind made many things dim 
which to others seemed clear. 

Years of meditation and sorrow had brought 
him a faith of his own — a kind of sublime fatal- 
ism in which truth and right will win as surely as 
suns rise and set. This assurance fed his soul and 
was the hidden spring of his strength, his valor, 
and his unbending firmness, the secret at once of 
his character and of his prophetic insight. Hold- 
ing to the moral order of the world, lie knew that 
truth will prevail whatever may be the posture of 
the hour. In his moods of melancholy, which 
were many and bitter, he threw himself upon this 
confidence, not so much in formal prayer — 
though that was his last resort as in a deep 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 43 

inner assurance in which he found peace, and 
power. Some one asked his wife about his reli- 
gion and she replied, "It is a kind of poetry." 
Her insight was delicate and true ; his faith was 
none other than a simple, home-spun morality 
touched with poetry. 

For, with all his solid common sense, his fine 
poise of reason, and his wise humor, at bottom 
Lincoln was a mystic — that is, one who felt that 
the unseen has secrets which are known only by 
minds fine enough to hear them. The truth is 
that, in common with all the great leaders of men, 
he had much of this fineness of soul in himself — 
a window opening out into the Unseen, whence 
great men derive their strength and charm. This 
it was that gave to his words a quality of their 
own, and they seem to this day full of ever new 
prophetic meanings. No man of state in this land 
ever made so deep a religious impression and 
appeal as Lincoln did in his last days. Poetry 
had made friends with logic, and the very soul of 
the man shone in his words and work of mercy, in 
the dignity and pathos of his life, in his solicitude 
to heal the wounds of a war he had sought to avert. 
Such a character inspires a kind of awe. Men 



44 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

bow to it, and are touched with a mingled feeling 
of wonder and regret. 

Of all the great rulers of men, Lincoln is to this 
day at once the most dearly human and the most 
sincerely revered. He was a man of artless and 
unstudied simplicity ; a lawyer with the heart of a 
humanitarian ; a man of action led by a seer-like 
vision ; a humorist whose heart was full of tears ; 
as unwavering in justice as he was unfailing in 
mercy. Such a man the times demanded, and 
such in the providence of God was given to his 
country and his race. 

On the virgin soil of the West he grew, as a tree 
grows — only, his roots ran both ways, down into 
the dark earth and up into the Unseen — a man, 
as Grady said, in whose ample nature the virtues 
of Puritan and Cavalier were blended, and in the 
depths of whose great soul the faults of both were 
lost — "not a law-breaker, but a law-maker; a 
fighter, but for peace ; a calm, grave, strong man ; 
formidable, sad; facing down injustice, dishon- 
esty, and crime; and dying 'in his boots' in de- 
fense of an ideal — of all world-types distinctive 
to us, peculiar, particular, and unique. ' ' Simple 
as TEsop, yet subtle as an oriental; meditative as 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 45 

Marcus Aurelius, yet blithe as Mark Twain; as 
much of a democrat as Walt Whitman, yet devoid 
of that vague, dreamy egotism, he stood in the 
White House a high priest of humanity in this 
land, where are being wrought out the highest 
ideals of the race. All now know that the Union 
was the one mastering idea of his life, and that 
whoever else might let go of faith, or sink into 
self-seeking, or play fast and loose with truth, 
that would Lincoln never. He was a prophet of 
the political religion of his country — tall of soul, 
gentle, just, and wise, and of his fame there will 
be no end. 

Our nation makes a wise profession of ideals 
when it pays tribute to Abraham Lincoln, for that 
within him which we honor is the saving grace of 
the republic. On the distant slopes of fame we 
begin to see that homely, humorous, sad, strong, 
tender man as he was, and as few saw him while 
he lived. No one need fear that his real image 
will be lost in a haze of reverent and grateful 
memory, for he becomes more real and more un- 
f orgetable every year. There is no Lincoln myth. 
Fable falls away from his simple human majesty 
as we stand before his later portraits, looking into 



46 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

that great face, with its blend of light and shadow, 
its calm, level gaze, so frank, so benign, and withal 
so firm and far-seeing. Nothing that unfolding 
Time discloses diminishes his noble, heroic, pa- 
thetic stature, and the nation grows, when it 
grows at all, up to, but never away from him. 

Still, and always, when we look back at Lincoln 
and see him amidst the vicissitudes of his life, it 
is the man that we honor — a plain, honest, kindly 
man, sound of heart, full equally of pity and 
humor, who knew that humanity is deeply wound- 
ed and who tried to heal it ; caring much more to 
deserve praise than to possess it; not free from 
fault and therefore rich in charity, — a fellow 
to the finest, rarest, truest souls now or ever to be 
"citizens of eternity." 



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